Blackbringer (31 page)

“Of this I can be certain. Only I can release him. And I never will.”

“Oh . . . So that’s why he’s come here, then. Not to kill you, at least not until he gets you to release him.” She paused, thinking. “And the pomegranate, neh? That must have something to do with it.”

The Magruwen flared for a wild instant, then caught himself and sank back into a low burn. “Pomegranate?” he repeated.

Magpie squinted at him. “Aye, the one he sent the imp to you for. I can’t figure what he’d want with a pomegranate.”

“Nor I,” said the Djinn.

Again Magpie squinted at him. It was clear from the way he had flared up that she had caught him off guard. Well, now he wanted to lie to her. What could she do about that? Chewing her lip, she said carefully, “That’s mad strange, neh? He came all this way for it. And you know nothing of it?”

The Magruwen was silent.

Magpie crossed her arms and frowned. “Okay, then. But supposing we can put the Blackbringer back into his bottle, will you make a new seal for it?”

“If you capture him, little bird, I will seal the vessel.”

“Good. Thank you. This seal, though, it will have to hold out humans too.”

“I’ll need something from them to work that magic.”

“Will hair do?”

“Aye.”

Magpie turned to Calypso. “Would you mind, my feather, fetching us back a pigtail or two from above?”

He fluffed up his feathers, looking more ragged than ever after his brushes with the Djinn, and grumbled, “I don’t like leavin’ ye, ‘Pie.” He gave the Djinn King a hard look and asked Magpie, “Ye’ll be careful, neh?”

She hugged him around his neck and whispered, “Aye, feather,” and he flew off. She turned back to the Magruwen. “Will it take you long to make it?”

“Will it take you long to catch him?”

Magpie scowled. “Go quicker if you’d help. But there’s something else first, anywhich.”

“Oh, aye?”

“Aye . . .” She took a deep breath and blurted, “I’m going to get them back! His victims.”

“Get them back? From where?”

“Well, I don’t know! They never turned up in the Moonlit Gardens, Lord, and . . . I had this dream last night—”

“Quite a night for dreams it was.”

“Aye, and maybe we dream such things each night and don’t remember them. Think of what’s lost! Bellatrix said dreams are how everything begins, and I dreamed I let the darkness overtake me and then, inside, I held up a light—”

“No light can withstand that darkness. It will fade like everything else.”

“There
are
lights there, though,” she said. “I’ve been there. I was inside him for an instant—”

The Magruwen flickered, surprised.

“And I saw dying lights everywhere. Sure you could fashion something. Stars—stars burn bright in the emptiness each night, neh?” A thought struck Magpie then. “Wait. When you made the Blackbringer’s skin, you said you plucked out all the stars?”

The Magruwen said nothing.

“Well, what did you do with them?” Magpie asked.

But even as she asked, she knew. Traceries spiraled across her vision, gleaming and glorious, as she caught a glimpse of the Tapestry with her inner eyes, without the Djinn’s help. In that instant she saw the threads the Djinn had spun in secret so very long ago, gathered in hiding while the Astaroth raged against the Tapestry. Here it was, not just the skin of night, but also the receptacle for the stars the Djinn had plucked from it like berries.

“The pomegranate!” she cried. “That’s what it is! That’s where you hid the stars!”

Before Magpie’s eyes and Talon’s, the Djinn suddenly flared again, as he had when Magpie had first mentioned the pomegranate, but now he didn’t catch himself, and the deep blue fire of his core surged and overtook him. The heat, like a woodstove door blowing open, knocked the faeries backward from their perch and into the deep smoke.

Lying on their backs with treasure poking into them while the smoke swirled madly just over their heads, Talon whispered to Magpie, “I wish you’d quit surprising him like that. He’s going to torch us one of these times.”

“Don’t I know. First Fade almost snorted me into ash and now him. I wish he’d put on a skin.”

They rolled over onto their bellies and crawled through a spill of jewels. “Look,” said Talon, holding up the edge of a piece of tattered fabric. It was much heavier than his own skin but he knew it for what it was. “There’s why he isn’t wearing a skin.”

“Ach, that thing must be mad ancient.”

“Aye, I reckon. Bet it has dragon scale woven in it, by the weight of it, to make it fireproof.”

“Come on.”

They rose and scampered under the smoke to a place where a stack of helmets rose like a tower with its peak lost in clouds. They climbed it cautiously, holding their breath through the choking layer of smoke, and peered out to see that the Magruwen had gathered himself back in. He was waiting for them. “There are . . .
lights
. . . within him?” he asked.

Magpie and Talon clambered onto the uppermost helmet and stood. “I saw them,” Magpie answered. “And in my dream I held up a light and they all flared to life!”

“It was a dream.”

“Aye, a dream. And don’t you think it could be true, that those could be their sparks still burning? Poppy, who made that cordial, could be trapped there, and Maniac, my crow brother, and Talon’s kin. . . . Lord, I have to try. I can’t capture the Blackbringer without knowing—I could be trapping all those sparks in the darkness with him forever!”

“What you speak of, going willingly into him, it is suicide. He will do to you what he did to your friends and kin. He will unmake you. You will never enter that empty place, do you hear me?”

“But Lord Magruwen, if you give me the pomegranate, I—”

“In this you will be ruled by me! I would no sooner give you the pomegranate than unfasten the skin of night and loose the Astaroth on the world. It would amount to the same thing. Don’t you see? That’s what he wants. It’s all he wants.”

“Oh,” said Magpie, understanding. “The stars . . .”

“Restored to the skin, they would unlock it.”

Talon said, “And he’d be free . . .”

“To destroy the Tapestry,” concluded the Magruwen.

“But
one
star—” continued Magpie stubbornly.

“Beyond question!” the Djinn King roared with such scorching finality that Magpie’s mouth, opening out of habit to argue and cajole, found itself empty of words and snapped right shut.

“You will capture the Blackbringer,” the Djinn went on. “And I will seal the bottle. You will attempt nothing else, do you understand?”

Magpie’s mouth had pinched itself into a straight line, and her eyes flashed as she stared up at the Djinn, unblinking, and said nothing. He flared brighter, and still she didn’t blink. Talon looked back and forth between them, the towering figure of living fire with his terrible horns and the twig of a lass perched on a teetering stack of helmets. The stare they held in common was like a fuse running between their eyes that any moment could ignite an explosion.

Finally Magpie said in a tight voice, “I will make no promise to forsake my friends and brothers, if there is any possible chance I might save them.”

When the Magruwen let out an exasperated hiss, Talon had to duck under the spray of sparks.

“Pigtail delivery,” squawked Calypso from the doorway. They all turned to him unsmiling, and he caught sight of Magpie’s face. “Ach,” he said, flying over. “Ye got on yer ornery mouth.” He whispered hoarsely in her ear, “Sure ye’re not defying the Djinn King, pet. I was
that
sure ye were no eejit.”

She turned her stern face on him then, and the line of her mouth softened into a frown. “Ach, well, you may yet be surprised,” she said, then looked back up at the Magruwen. “Lord,” she implored. “Please . . . how better to start a new age than to right old wrongs? All those sparks the Blackbringer stole leave a lot of cold places behind in the world, empty shoes and torn lives, and why not start fresh by stealing them back and making things whole? Whatever it was faeries did in the past, whatever treachery, it’s done, and sure the past can’t be undone, but it can be forgiven. I swear I’ll do everything I can to make you proud of faeries again, and how much finer will it be to build a new age on forgiveness than on anguish?”

“There will always be anguish.”

Magpie heard what he said but paid closer heed to what he didn’t say. He didn’t say there would be no new age; he didn’t say he could never forgive. With a stir of hope she tried one last thing. “And Lord, what of this? I saw all those lights in him! What if he keeps their sparks burning inside him? What if he
needs
them? What if they give him strength, and we can take them away?”

The Magruwen’s vertical eyes looked hard at her. After a moment he said, “Put the hair there, crow, and leave me. All of you.” He turned away. “I’ll have the seal for you tomorrow.”

Magpie waited, holding her breath. At length the Djinn muttered, almost inaudibly, “And one star. One. Only one.”

 

The faeries had rejoined the crows and were well into Dreamdark when, behind them at the school grounds, the earth began to tremble.

The quaking was rhythmic as the approaching footsteps of some slow giant. In the manor, windowpanes rattled and fell still, rattled and fell still, again and again. White-faced, the humans listen in silence until the headmistress looked out the window to see smoke roiling out from the old well. Its plumes were
braiding
themselves in patterns as they rose to disperse on the wind. She gasped, and her gasp unlocked the moment. Schoolgirls shrieked. White frocks fluttered.

“To the chapel!” cried the headmistress, grabbing lasses and shoving them in the right direction.

In the dooryard the chickens ate on, merely jumping a little with each tremor. Strag the shindy perked up and looked around. With unchickenlike agility he hopped up onto a fence post and gazed at the column of smoke. He had not yet been hatched the last time the world shook from the force of a Djinn’s hammer on anvil, but he knew the sound for what it was, and his heartbeat quickened. Long had he dreamed that he would live to see the Djinn reclaim the world, and if the old scorch was back at work under the earth, that meant that times, well, they were most certainly going to change.

He threw back his bald head and crowed.

Several times during the flight over Dreamdark, Talon switched crows mid-air, perfecting a daredevil leap between Bertram and Mingus whenever one or the other began to flag from his extra weight. As they swooped in toward the castle he spotted his sister on the ramparts and dove off Bertram, flipping once to land in a crouch at Nettle’s feet.

“Talon Rathersting!” she breathed in a deadly voice, grabbing his tunic with both fists and drawing his face close to hers. “Where you been? Flying off like that—”

He answered, “Beyond. I’ve been beyond,” and watched her mouth fall open. Magpie dropped down abruptly beside him and the crows began to land noisily on the ramparts. “You won’t believe it, Nettle,” said Talon. “We saw the Magruwen!”

“Stubborn old scorch,” added Magpie.

“
Him
stubborn? I thought I was watching a stubborn-match and I’m still not sure who won!” Talon teased her. “Oh, and by the way,” he added, reaching out to smack her neck, “slap the slowpoke.”

“Skive!” She twisted away, smiling, and said, “I thought you didn’t play eejit sports, eh?”

Nettle, looking back and forth between them with her mouth still hanging open, managed to say, “What?”

“Oh!” Magpie reached into her pocket and produced her last bit of chocolate.

Talon gave it to Nettle. “It’s manny food, Nettle. Try it!”

“Manny food?” she repeated, but before they could attempt an answer Pup and Pigeon barged forward, tugging at Batch’s tail while the imp still floated above their heads like a balloon.

He had a look of glee on his face and was crying, “Wheeee!!!” and flapping his little arms until Magpie unspelled him and he plopped back down onto the stones with a howl.

“Back to the dungeon with him,” Magpie said. “But he’s got to have a guard full time.”

“Neh, not the dungeon!” protested Batch. “Mudsucking munchmeats!”

“All right, come on,” Talon said, leading the way down a flight of stone steps. He glanced back at Nettle and said sternly, “Eat that!”

Nettle watched the whole procession go by, faeries, crows, and one cursing imp, her eyes narrow with suspicion. But when they were gone she unwrapped the little paper and hesitantly put the sweet in her mouth, and she felt considerably more forgiving after that.

 

After a quick encounter with some hot water and soap and a misguided attempt to drag a comb through her hair, Magpie straightened her tunic and headed down the labyrinthine corridors and stairs toward the Great Hall. There she found Talon in front of the massive fireplace with Orchidspike, Nettle, and two older faeries whom he introduced as his mother, Lady Bright, and his uncle Orion, the chief’s brother. Like most of the ladies Magpie had seen about the castle, Talon’s mother—Rathersting by marriage, not birth—had no tattoos. Orion was gruff and grizzled, with a broad scar marring half the black designs on his face.

Magpie curtsied to the lady. Orion nodded to her and she nodded back, but her attention was claimed by the food on the long tables, platters and platters of food. As she greeted the others, her eyes kept returning to it. Chestnut pudding, corn bread, ripe red tomatoes, custard in fig syrup, soft blue beetlemilk cheeses wrapped in leaves, steaming stew, crispy fried squash blossoms . . . Her stomach rumbled loudly and a mere instant later Talon’s stomach cut in even louder.

“Eat, then.” Lady Bright laughed as a biddy set down an enormous tray of hot loaves.

They grabbed plates and heaped them high, then hauled them to a table where they began to eat as if it were a competition. If it was a competition, Magpie lost, for she slumped back in her chair and groaned while there was yet food on her plate. She said, “If I had food like that waiting for me at the end of each day, I’d be fat as a tick on a manny’s fanny!”